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Opposing the SNP’s draconian Named Person Scheme is a smart, principled move for the Scottish Tories

By making the Scottish Conservative Party’s opposition to the totalitarian Named Person Scheme a centre-piece of their Holyrood election campaign, once again Ruth Davidson is distinguishing herself as one of the only sane and vaguely liberty-loving politicians in the whole of Scotland.

Ruth Davidson has said that scrapping the SNP’s plan to assign every child a state guardian has become the most urgent Holyrood election priority for Scottish voters with nine days of campaigning left and grandparents are leading the charge against it.

In an interview with the Telegraph, she said many families were unaware of the Named Person scheme when the election campaign started a month ago but it is now the issue on the doorstep that inflames the most passion and outrage – even more so than independence.

She said that grandparents are particularly furious that their sons and daughters are being subjected to “state snoopers”, when they were not, and pledged the Scottish Tories would immediately demand the scheme be brought back before parliament if they succeed in becoming the main opposition party.

They have every right to be furious. Whether any given Scottish person wants their top layer of government to reside in Holyrood or Westminster, surely anybody should agree that the bottom layer of government should not intrude deep into the family unit in the way that the Named Person Scheme does.

Nicola Sturgeon is busily trying to spin the suggestion that this is a purely voluntary scheme, which utterly fails the common sense test – why have a scheme supposedly designed to protect children from the most broken and dysfunctional families, when only well behaved (and rather too obedient) families would ever voluntarily sign up? For there to be any point at all to the legislation, it has to be universal and compulsory.

As Ruth Davidson points out in the exchange shown in the video above, the Scottish Conservatives tabled an amendment to the original bill trying to seek an opt-out for parents, but were overridden by the SNP.

Key quote:

Ruth Davidson: Can I remind the chamber that the Scottish Conservatives laid specific amendments to the bill allowing parents to opt out of the Named Person Scheme, and those amendments were voted down by her party, and shouted down by her minister who said such state guardians were to be a universal service.

Every child, from birth to eighteen, with a Named Person attached. A Named Person with access to private and sensitive information, all recorded in a database, and able to be accessed without the consent or even the knowledge of the parents in some cases.

If the Named Person Scheme is truly voluntary, why fight so hard to defeat a motion establishing a parental opt-out? The answer, of course, is that the scheme being rolled out this year is not voluntary in the slightest.

It appears that Sturgeon is playing fast and loose with the truth, portraying the fact that parents can choose not to engage with their child’s Named Person as being the same thing as not having a Named Person assigned in the first place. But of course these are two very different things. Even if a parent rightly chooses not to engage with this overbearing arm of the state, the Named Person is still there, working away in the background, able to view all manner of sensitive data and information about the child with no recourse for the parents.

This is the SNP at work in government. A hectoring, overbearing movement which seeks to centralise everything they can touch, from the state monitoring of children to the police and fire services – with deadly consequences, in the latter cases.

Heading into the Holyrood elections, Scottish voters need to understand that there is nothing pro-liberty about supporting the Scottish National Party. While Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP may hold out the carrot of independence from Westminster, the only change which Scottish people will feel in their daily lives is an emboldened, empowered independent Scottish government taking even more powers away from the individual and vesting them in the SNP’s monolithic nanny state.

The Named Person Scheme is a shot across the bows. There could well be far worse to come from the SNP.

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